中英雙語育子經驗談

Code switching

“Georgia” (9) has a stronger tendency to switch to speaking English, compared to our 12 year old daughter, “Charlotte”, who can pretty much express herself well in Chinese the great majority of the time. So, seeing that Georgia needs extra work on fuller colloquial expression, we hired a tutor to work with her on the weekend, one hour on Saturday and one hour on Sunday. She reads aloud story books with more colloquial expressions and conversations with the tutor. The tutor also has Georgia make sentences verbally based on different sentence structures. After two months, she is doing better now.

Thankfully, Charlotte’s Chinese is strong that she continues to speak to Georgia in Chinese the great majority of the time and the two continue to converse in Chinese most of the time at home, where we continue to monitor and enforce the “Chinese Only” policy.

As I had written before, it is important that the elder child has excellent colloquial Chinese so that the younger child has a fighting chance to learn Chinese well enough.